1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to the field of communications and, more particularly, to a method for communication over virtual networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of cloud-based computing has led to development of many virtualization technologies. One such technology relates to server virtualization. This provides customer with a virtual network that is customer-configurable and can be changed by altering virtual routers and virtual switches without any change in hardware.
Various such technologies are in use, for example VX-LAN (Virtual Extensible LAN) that allows multiple virtual machines to connect with each other. The data packets in such technologies may be transferred between the virtual machines via multiple layers of the OSI model, including, L2 (Layer-2, i.e. Link Layer), L3 (Layer-3, i.e. Network Layer). Further, the virtual L2 networks' packets may be transported over the existing L3 network, without requiring any changes to the L3 network using methods such as VX-LAN. However, a few problems still exist while managing connections between the virtual machines using methods such as VX-LAN.
During transfer of packets, the packets being transferred are encapsulated with a VNI (VX-LAN Network Identifier). For example, it may encapsulate the packet with a DMAC (Destination MAC address), a SMAC (Source MAC address), and a VNI if it is layer 2 or in case of Layer 3, encapsulate the actual packet with a DIP (Destination IP address), a SIP (Source IP address), and UDP (User Datagram Protocol).
In both cases, the COS (Class of Service) value is completely encapsulated. The same kind of encapsulation is also done for DSCP (Differentiated services code point) and TTL (Time to Live) values of Layer 3.
However, since most of the virtualized servers are supposed to provide zero loss, it is necessary to inherit the actual COS and TTL value in the encapsulated header, which is not possible if they are encapsulated.
Also, there are also no provisions to trace or identify VX-LAN data path or nodes where there might be faults and accordingly diagnose any broken connections.
According to the foregoing discussion, it can be observed that the existing methods and mechanisms used are inadequate to ensure high performance, better reliability of the VX-LAN systems. In light of this, therefore, there is a need for an improved method which overcomes some or all of the limitations identified above.